Biweekly links for 05/15/2009

“But we decided to do something different with Expressive Processing: we asked the community around an academic blog — Grand Text Auto — to participate in an open, blog-based peer review at the same time as the anonymous review.”

“The purpose of the video abstracts is to provide brief video abstracts to recent papers on the arXiv. The abstracts provide a “teaser” for the paper and should guide the audience into your work, emphazising what you think is the most important result. Everybody is welcome to contribute – just take out your webcam and upload a new video!”

“Patents on two human genes linked to breast and ovarian cancers are being challenged in court by the American Civil Liberties Union, which argues that patenting pure genes is unconstitutional and hinders research for a cancer cure.

“Knowledge about our own bodies and the ability to make decisions about our health care are some of our most personal and fundamental rights,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. “The government should not be granting private entities control over something as personal and basic to who we are as our genes.””

“In January and February 2006, a large South Korean flag was constructed on the Drawball by members of several Internet forums (or many South Korean people). The flag was constantly expanded and repaired, and as the first of many logos to come, it was quite noticeable from the ball.

Members of various communities colluded to vandalize the Korean flag. On February 27, 2006, the flag was turned almost entirely neon green. It was because of this large attack that Drawball gained its current presence. The website became so flooded that hundreds of people at a time were put in queue before being able to access the Drawball. After extensive attack, the center of the flag was eventually converted into a Pepsi logo, and, like all Drawball drawings, the space was eventually reclaimed by other users.”

More in the Moorcock vein. It's easy to imagine the reaction of the critic, holding their nose at writing to formula. But you can turn that around, regarding Dent (and, more plausibly, Moorcock) as a student and theoretician of structure. And that's a pretty powerful point of view. Of course, word-by-word Dent is a poor […]

Fascinating both intrinsically, and for the commentary. The commentary first: part of the interest is from people who desire an easy way to write (or, more accurately, to have written). But there is also clearly a genuine interest on the part of many: what does this guy know that I don't about storytelling? You may […]

Kevin Kelly interviews Brian Eno. Slow to get going, but fascinating. Eno proposes "process, not product", says that it's his "ease of seduction" that means he often gets things first, talks about putting more "Africa" into computers, and generally makes many interesting comments.

Documentary of Wolfgang Steiner, one of the world's top ski-jumpers in the 1970s. The spine of the documentary is a sequence of extraordinary shots of Steiner's jumps, taken with a pair of high-speed cameras.

Remarkable survey of the cutting edge of surfing. We see the origins of tow-rope surfing (where surfers are pulled by jet skis into waves that are too big to paddle out to), the use of hydrofoil designs that put the board a foot or two _above_ the wave, and even the use of weather stations […]